British Telecom Case Study
British Telecom Case Study
Call-Data Visualisation Tool
Company Profile
British Telecommunications plc (BT) is one of the world's leading providers of telecommunications services and one of the largest private sector companies in Europe. Its principal activities include local, long distance and international telecommunications services, mobile communications, Internet services and IT solutions.
Business Requirements
A major market for British Telecom is Telemarketing Service Providers (TSPs) which provide freephone services where BT provides the raw data. BT wanted to offer these TSPs a PC-based 'Call-Data Visualisation' tool to enable them to manipulate the raw call data and view the information in a range of 3D graphical views for easier assimilation and to facilitate the identification of patterns, trends and anomalies. BT also wanted the tool to provide extensive data mining and analysis functionality. In addition, the data had to be distributed weekly on a CD-ROM.
As part of this project, BT required two executable programs; a Data Viewer to show 3D representations of traffic profiles enabling the user to browse through large volumes of data at a time, and a Data Manager to manage the large volumes of call data available on the CD-ROM. A further requirement was to develop a Java-based system to enable the CD-ROM data to be viewed using a browser.
Our Solution
To meet the initial requirements, Beacon developed the Call-Data Visualisation tool as a stand-alone program. The tool was split into three applications - the Data Query, Data Manager and Data Viewer components. Since Beacon had developed the initial tool based on an object-oriented methodology, Beacon were able to easily adapt the tool to the Java-based system.
Each week the user receives a new CD-ROM where the Data Manager loads data onto the PC hard drive and pre-processes the data to produce a format suitable for use by both the Data Viewer and Data Query applications. The Data Viewer presents a highly graphical user interface enabling graphs of the call data to be displayed and animated with 'saveable' display options. The Data Query tool creates SQL queries to query information contained in the call data allowing the user to load and save queries, create new queries by using a Wizard-style SQL Query Builder, and view the results of queries in a data grid view. The application also enables the user to format the resulting data grid in various ways, to print the grid’s contents and to export the results grid to applications such as MS Excel.
In order to prevent the TSPs from having to load the tool onto their PC's, Beacon developed a Java-based system with a Java web server compatible with the TSPs PC Internet Explorer or Netscape browsers and with the data on a CD-ROM.
Due to data transfer rates, BT decided to continue using CD-ROMs rather than the Internet as a distribution medium. This system can be easily migrated to a full Internet-based solution as the bandwidth of Internet connections increase to match the available technology.
